7 Beers That Defined America Through the Ages

In this booming era of nearly 5,000 American breweries, each seemingly making hundreds of different beers per year, it can be difficult for any one offering to pervade the national consciousness, let alone transform into a household name. Sure, the Bud-Miller-Coors of the world are known by all these days, in the same way McDonald’s and Wal-Mart are—but their ubiquity now isn't necessarily a sign of their cultural cachet.

Likewise, every so often a certain craft beer becomes so revolutionary, so important, so desired, that even your mom will have heard about it. “Have you tried that Heady Topper yet, honey?” she asks you. In reality though, the Headys, Plinys, and Juliuses of the world mostly remain geek obsessions.

Before the craft-beer movement kicked into full gear, and before Sierra Nevada released a pale ale that launched a thousand breweries, the country was mostly lacking in breweries. There were a few national companies, a few regional breweries too, and for any single one of their releases to find a way to dominate the culture would have seemed a minor miracle. Yet it occasionally happened for a variety of reasons—from a lack of availability, to the invention of a one-of-a-kind technology, to the mighty influence of men with ironic mustaches.

These are a few of those stories, including tales of big brands that once generated rabid cult followings. Like when Coors became so damn desired it led to covert smuggling operations and a Hollywood blockbuster; or when Miller Lite became the coolest drink for macho, macho men; and even when the whacky decade of “Corona-mania” convinced one writer to eventually call it nothing more than a “hula hoop, an offbeat fancy that had run its inevitable course.”

Here we look back at some of these beers that spoke to the zeitgeist of their respective eras. From pulling America out of the Prohibition era, to the introduction of a beer black market, here are the brews that came to define America throughout the ages.

Hamm's

Image via Flickr/Joe Haupt

Peak relevance: 1933 and onWhy it mattered: Helped pull America out of Prohibition

It’s an amusing quirk of Prohibition that, when it ended on December 5, 1933, several American breweries almost instantly had beer ready to sell. One such brewery was Minnesota’s Hamm’s, who had “kept busy” during the thirteen years of Prohibition by making soft drinks. Post-Prohibition, they quickly went back to the hard stuff and were soon selling so much of it to hard-drinking Minnesotans—who supposedly used “Hamm’s” as a synonym for beer—that they were able to expand into a national entity. In the following decades they built satellite breweries in L.A., San Francisco, Baltimore, and Houston, before being sold off in the 1960s and then passed around to various companies.

Ballantine IPA

IPAs are red hot now, but there was obviously a time they were a completely novel. Cited as America’s first IPA, Ballantine somehow became extremely popular in the middle of the decade. Perhaps that was because it was 7.9% ABV—fairly alcoholic now, but a total booze bomb during the Leave it to Beaver era. It was also obviously much more bitter than the beers of the era, that being due to a unique hop oil utilized in the brewing process. This all eventually led to its brewery, P. Ballantine and Sons Brewing Company, becoming the third largest brewery in the country. By the 1960s, the country’s palate had switched to light lagers, and Ballantine sales began to plummet. (The recipe began to change to try and keep up with the times.) By 1996, the beer was dead, only remembered in nostalgic paeans from old guys. In 2014, Pabst, the current owner of the Ballatine brand, released a recreation of the IPA—it was honestly not bad!

Rheingold

Image via Flickr/slgckcg

Peak relevance: 1950s-mid-1970sWhy it mattered: Showed that regionality in beer could be an important selling point

Of course nowadays, Brooklyn is a beer epicenter. And just about every weekend, you'll find geeks from up and down the Atlantic coast lining up to score cans from Other Half, Three Brewing, Greenpoint Beer & Ale, and Grimm. But for most of the latter half of the 20th century and well into the 21st, to associate quality breweries with the borough would have been laughable. Not so earlier in the decade though, when two brands dominated the state and eventually pervaded national drinking. Rheingold Beer was the best-selling one, accounting for 35% of the state’s beer guzzling and sponsoring a Miss Rheingold beauty contest that was as followed as the Miss America pageant. The slightly smaller Schaefer Beer was promoted as “the one beer to have when you're having more than one” and so popular was the brewery it was put up as a $108 million public offering in 1968. By the 1970s the national brands had come to dominate, and these two Brooklyn-based breweries soon closed up shop. Brooklyn was, alas, no longer cool. In recent times both beers have been revived, their brand holders clearly trying to capitalize on a certain nostalgia.

Coors Banquet Beer

Image via Flickr/Cherry Darlin'

Peak relevance: 1970sWhy it mattered: The first beer that necessitated a black market

Believe it or not, there was a time American beer drinkers lusted for Coors Banquet Beer the same way the modern beer geek dreams of scoring some Heady Topper cans. No, the beer wasn’t any better than today’s rice-based lager—but it was rarer, only distributed within some 13 western U.S. states. Coors claimed that not only could they not make enough beer, but that their unpasteurized brew demanded being distributed exclusively via refrigerated trucks, lest it “spoil.” Thus, a mystique was built, and soon east coast folks were smuggling cases upon cases of the beer back home after a visit to the Rockies. In 1977, Coors even took out an ad in the Washington Post saying “Please don’t buy our beer,” insisting any in the area was clearly black market, mishandled, and prone to becoming “watery” (you can laugh now). This insane thirst for Coors hit its apex with the release of Smokey and the Bandit, the Burt Reynolds action-comedy about a legendary trucker (Reynolds, natch) willing to risk life, limb, and the law to illegally smuggle crates of Coors back to Georgia. By the late-1970s, it was finally distributed nationally, reaching all 50 states by 1991.

Miller Lite

Image via Flickr/Paul Sableman

Peak relevance: 1975-1977Why it mattered: Set the stage for the light beer revolution

If the modern craft beer era was built on “more is better”—hoppier IPAs, boozier stouts—during the late-1960s and early-1970s, a war was waged on who could go lighter. Miller Lite was, for the most part, the world’s first “lite” beer. The inventor of light beer, Joseph L. Owades, would first sell his process and recipe to Meister Brau who, after financial problems, sold it to Miller. Like Coors, it was mostly a regional beer in the early '70s, not going national until 1975. Surprisingly, its connection to toughguy sports culture—wow, Joe Frazier!—made it OK for cool dudes to drink the low-ABV, watery offering. The slogan “Everything you’ve always wanted in a beer. And less” was actually a big selling point. Soon, Miller Lite was the second best selling beer in America. Nowadays, of course, every macro-brewing conglomerate has a bevy of light beers, and Miller Lite has fallen well behind Bud Light and Coors Light in total sales.

Corona

Of course Corona is still a juggernaut—the #1 best-selling import in America—but there was a time when it was part of an actual mania! First imported to America in 1981, it was immediately seen as a luxury product, a foreign work of art that fit in perfectly with the decadent decade’s lust for Italian fashions, German cars, and Japanese electronics. Such a status symbol was the light-tasting beer in the clear, silk-screened bottles, that “Corona-mania” was coined. “The glass manufacturers couldn't turn out enough bottles. We couldn't get enough rail cars and trucks to get the stuff out of Mexico,” recalled Michael J. Mazzoni, vice president of Barton Beers, the major U.S. importer of Corona Extra, to the Los Angeles Times in 1990. A cleverly-placed rumor—apparently created by a Heineken distributor—that Corona was actually just Mexican factory workers’ urine, inexplicably put an end to this red-hot fad.

Pabst Blue Ribbon

Image via Getty/Justin Sullivan

Peak relevance: 2000sWhy it mattered: Because of those damn trend-setting hipsters

When you think about the beer that truly defined the aughts, it’s not a craft beer, even though the movement was significant. The single beer that unquestionably dominated the era was actually the little macro that could: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Along with funny mustaches and fixie bicycles, PBR became one of the stereotypical signifiers for an urban hipster. After decades of declining sales, PBR boomed in the 2000s, through no advertising per se—just through sponsorships of indie music festivals and key placements at trendy dive bars. The rock-bottom prices for its iconic cans—often a buck or two during an era when craft beers were getting close to double digit dollars—couldn’t have hurt either. By the end of the era, the stereotype that hipsters love PBR had become a now incorrect, out-of-touch joke, and though the company sold for a reported $250 million in 2010, the once award-winning light lager is back in the doldrums of the beer world, surely bragging to Natty Lite and Milwaukee’s Best about the brief decade it was a contender.

Latest News

Now Trending

FIRST WE FEAST participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means FIRST WE FEAST gets paid commissions on purchases made through our links to retailer sites. Our editorial content is not influenced by any commissions we receive.